But it was reading about Spotlight just a few minutes ago that sealed the deal. See, Spotlight is a good 65% of what I had hoped to accomplish with ReComputing: as a pervasive, extensible indexing technology with an expressive front end (from what I've read), it makes the distinctions of where documents are stored a non-issue. With Smart Folders, it allows you to think in terms of logical collections (related materials) rather than physical ones (directories), although you have to manually have create them.
"Big deal," you might say. "It's only been announced, and you have event tried it out yet!" True. However, have you ever known Apple to put up a product announcement/preview on their site and then not deliver? Apple already has a cult following; it doesn't need to put hype on its site as the cultmembers all trek to Cupertino, CA to hang on every word Jobs speaks each year at MacWorld.
Now a lot of this is similar to what was originally announced/planned for Windows Longhorn, with WinFS supposed to be built on Yukon and NTFS, but it was all very confusing, and Longhorn isn't expected until 2006, and WinFS is not expected to debut in the 2006 release anyway. Spotlight is not as completely pervasive as my suggestion, which did away with notions like having to save files (you could identify a file or group of files if you wanted to, but it really wasn't necessary), directories and what not. I still think there's a good argument to be made for such a system, and I still think that a Windows NT 5+ kernel makes for the best underpinnings for such a system.
Apple seems to be taking hold of the industrial design, ergonomics and usability gauntlet(s). I wonder if anyone will take that as a challenge?
Yes, yes, Microsoft owns part of Apple, blah blah blah...
I've never been disapointed with Mac OS X. Although, I still find that I can crash it in but a few mouse clicks (even doing normal things, not sure why, it's a useful skill though) though. But it is pretty clean and straight forward in it's usage.
Hrm, this sounds like something Novell was working on as well...suppose I should dig through some of their old emails and see if I can't find the name of the project
Ahh, sounds like a good time to strike...
Possibly, although I still think it will take a pretty big push to move users over. The unknown is frightening to most people, not an oportunity to exploit. I really wish they wouldn't announce these things until they were sure they could actually make the date. Tis annoying to be thwarted at every step.
They have always been for ease of use. Idiotproofness and simplicity for as long as I recall.